The estimates of productive and economic losses to coffee leaf rust in Central America are nothing short of staggering. Half of all coffee affected. Hundreds of millions of pounds of production losses projected. Hundreds of thousands of jobs lost. Economic losses running into the billions of dollars. Against this backdrop, we should not be surprised […]
This week, more than 15 months after it broke with Fairtrade International and rewrote the rules of Fair Trade for the U.S. marketplace with its Fair Trade for All initiative, Fair Trade USA has advanced a plan to measure the impacts of FT4All on all coffee farmers and farmworkers in the Fair Trade system. The […]
Last week, agricultural authorities and coffee organizations from Central America holed up in Panama for two days with research institutes, regional banks and UN agencies to try to hammer out a plan for responding to the coffee leaf rust outbreak. As I trolled the web for news of the meeting’s results, I came across this […]
During last year’s SCAA Symposium, Liam Brody of Root Capital urged participants to be “pathologically collaborative” in addressing the ills that continue to ail specialty coffee. Peter Giuliano suggested soon afterward that Liam had “blown up the Twitterverse” with the memorable call to cooperation. But the full echo of that call may only be sounding […]
Yesterday I shared some data showing how Castillo and Caturra samples performed as part of the baseline survey for our Borderlands Coffee Project. As I reflected on the quantitative results, which showed a narrow but persistent advantage for Caturra and a slightly higher upper bound, I wondered whether there was a quantitative difference between the […]
I recently concluded a series that examined the current campaign by Colombia’s coffee authorities to replace the country’s traditional coffee cultivars with the disease-resistant Castillo hybrid as part of their response to the coffee leaf rust epidemic. As part of that series, I wrote: At the risk of oversimplification, the debate has been framed by […]
A noted coffee breeder at the French research institute CIRAD has suggested that the coffee leaf rust emergency in Central America is the result of a “perfect storm.” Is there a silver lining anywhere in those storm clouds?
The Castillo cultivar has been the subject of considerable discussion and no small amount of controversy in the marketplace in recent years. At the risk of oversimplification, the debate has been framed by two positions: that of representatives of Colombia’s Federación Nacional de Cafeteros, who insist that Castillo will thrive in the specialty market because […]
Colombia’s Federación Nacional de Cafeteros is a most remarkable institution. Among the many achievements of which the FNC is justifiably proud is its long tradition of coffee research. The Federation’s first annual budget, way back in 1927, included funding for research into coffee production and disease. In 1938, Colombia established a National Coffee Research Center, […]
When our CAFE Livelihoods project in Mexico and Central America ended in 2011, several people asked me what I considered the signature successes of the project. I was sitting on three years of data from 4,633 farms tracking changes in productivity, income, coffee quality, access to infrastructure, etc. But instead of citing these data, I […]
